It’s a welcome event in a city where most people don’t have a fireplace — and where things that burn usually require a call to 911.

Indeed the tale of the Yule Log stretches back to November 1966, and like “A Christmas Carol” or “It’s a Wonderful Life,” it’s a holiday chestnut that’s worth telling every year.

The log burst onto the scene when WPIX President Fred Thrower was at a loss to find programming to replace a canceled Saturday night college basketball game on Christmas Eve.

In a memo to station staff, he proposed a closeup shot of a fire-bearing hearth hung with stockings — “to present,” he said, “a WPIX Christmas card to our viewers.”

He suggested the filmed log “would be repeated (using a video looping process) over and over continuously.” The Christmas music was his idea, too.

Thrower believed the log would act as a cozy holiday backdrop for apartment-dwellers who had no fireplaces of their own.

A 17-second loop of film — the flames skipped noticeably every time one particular moment repeated — was shot at Gracie Mansion during Mayor John Lindsay’s tenure. The log ran for three commercial-free hours on Dec. 24, 1966.

It was an instant hit.

But it was only a matter of time before tragedy struck. After only four years, station staffers noticed that the precious original 16mm footage had begun to degrade to the point that it needed to be redone.

But when WPIX asked Lindsay’s office for permission to return to Gracie Mansion and film a new Yule Log, the station was denied. The original camera crew had apparently ruined a $4,000 carpet after removing a fireplace grate in order to get a clearer view of the flames.

The Yule Log is a holiday tradition on WPIX.

(AP)

For reasons lost to time, WPIX filmed a new Yule Log at the height of summer — in California.

This log was featured annually until 1989, when the station doused the whole project. Hours of commercial-free fireplace footage had apparently hurt the station’s bottom line.

But the spark never went out completely.

In February 2000, Yule Log fan Joe Malzone of Totowa, N.J., created a website named Bring Back the Log and urged users to email the station in support of the timeless tradition.

The response, he said on his website, TVParty.com, “was tremendous.”

By December 2001, WPIX boss Betty Ellen Berlamino announced on WPLJ radio that the special would return after 11 hearthless years. Berlamino said people wanted “comfort food TV” in the aftermath of the 9/11 terrorist attacks.

The digitally restored program was the most-watched television program in the metropolitan New York area for Christmas Day of that year — and has been broadcast annually since.

The Yule Log has generated more knockoffs than those fake designer bags sold on Canal St. It’s available on demand, on a slew of WPIX’s sister stations, rival WLNY/Ch. 55, in Netflix’s hour-long “Fireplace for Your Home,” in a podcast, on about a dozen or so websites and of course, on YouTube.

This season there’s even one on the kid-friendly Hub cable channel — although it’s got a My Little Pony theme.

But that’s just a minor complaint. The renaissance of the televised Yule Log only proves that this important holiday flame will never burn out.